Beloved: Narrative Structure and Sethe’s Iron Wall
Beloved by Toni Morrison has a very interesting narrative structure. The novel circles around its core themes, its mysteries, getting ever closer with each chapter. The question then rises, why did Morrison choose to write like this? An easy answer: it’s simply a unique structure that makes the novel more interesting to read. However, there’s a much more complicated answer that deserves a closer look. There are two main memories that Morrison hints at slowly throughout part 1 until the full scene is finally revealed; those being the moment in the barn where Sethe’s milk is taken and the moment in the shack where Sethe kills the baby. The narrative structure of both moments is interesting, but here I’ll just focus on the first one as understanding Sethe’s response to the second event is too much for me to cover meaningfully here. The first event is more clear-cut, an intensely traumatic moment for Sethe. Sethe is an iron wall. From the very beginning of the novel, Paul D associates